Want to see how to install, deploy and update 99 desktops on an Intel NUC running CE while playing a game and getting education on how long a proper cup of tea takes to brew? Of course!

One of the best things I was involved in while at Citrix was seeing the evolution of the flagship product. From Metaframe 1.8 when I started to XenDesktop 7 when I left we always drove towards simplicity for the end user and eventually the admin. It’s this simple idea of taking away complexity and either replacing it with something easy and intuitive or just making once manual tasks automated and invisible.

With XenDesktop 7 Citrix made great steps with Machine Creation Services and right from the start I’ve been a vocal supporter because it fit the beliefs of Citrix so well. Nutanix brings this simplicity to another level by ensuring that not only is MCS easy to deploy but it’s also predictable and scalable – something that it has struggled with – much in the same way as linked clones did with Horizon View.

Over the last week or so I’ve been playing with my new Intel NUC and seeing what our free Community Edition can do. I’ve completed some simple provisioning tests because I was naturally curious as to how quickly a little home lab system can spin up desktops. The speed, as you’ll see below, is rather impressive but in this post I’m going to show you how easy it is to integrate XenDesktop and any Nutanix deployment running our own hypervisor AHV. The steps you see below are identical to how a full production Nutanix cluster would work so let me take you from zero to hero in 16 minutes. You’ll see what components need installing on the broker and how to set up a connection to, in this example, a single Nutanix Community Edition node.

In case you’re interested my NUC is a Skull Canyon model with two SSDs and 32GB RAM and was a lovely present from Intel for Nutanix being so bloody awesome.

About NutanixNoob.com

This site is written by David Gaunt, senior systems engineer at Nutanix.
David has been in the virtualisation arena since 2001 and worked at Citrix for 13 years and although Nutanix pays the bills all content on this site only contains his thoughts and ideas.